Monday, December 7, 2015

Updated March 2016Media coverage of
terrorist attacks that take the lives of a significant number of people is
pervasive, particularly just after the attacks take place. Is it our
imagination or have the number of terrorist attacks that have claimed a large
number of victims been on the increase or is it simply a reflection of the
non-stop, 24 hour news cycle?

Fortunately, the National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism has recently
released a study that looks at how many single
terrorist attacks there have been in a single nation in a single day over the
period between 1970 and 2014 in which there have been more than 100 victims,
excluding the terrorists themselves. The authors found that over the 44
year timeframe, there have been 176 attacks that fall within their definition
of a mass-fatality terrorist attack.

Here is a graphic showing
the number of times that more than 100 people were killed by terrorist attacks
on a single day in a single country:

Obviously, it's not our
imagination or the impact of the 24 hour news cycle; 2014 was a bad year for
mass-fatalilty terrorist attacks.

The first mass-fatality terrorist attack in the
study occurred in 1978 when an arson attack which targeted the Cinema Rex
Theatre in Abadan, Iran ended up killing 430 people. Until the September 11, 2001
attack in the United States, this was the deadliest single act of contemporary
terrorism. Interestingly, there was popular speculation that agents of
the Iranian government, headed by the Shah of Iran, had used the attack to kill
several dissidents in the building. It was one of the factors that
ultimately led to the mass demonstrations that ended up with the Shah of Iran
being deposed and replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini. This is a prime example of possible state-sponsored terrorism that went terribly wrong.

On average, over the four
decades plus, there have been an average of 4.2 mass-fatality terrorist attacks
every year. Unfortunately, as the graph shows, 2014 was an outlier with
26 mass-fatality terrorist attacks that took place in eight different
countries:

Afghanistan - one event

Central African Republic
- one event

Iraq - nine events

Nigeria - nine events

Pakistan - one event

South Sudan - one event

Syria - three events

Ukraine - one event

Of the 26 days in which
there were mass-fatality terrorist events in 2014, eleven were the
responsibility of ISIS. In the case of Nigeria, all nine attacks in 2014
were the responsibility of Boko Haram.

Between 2000 and 2014,
there were 83 days on which more than 100 people were killed by terrorists in a
single country. These attacks took place in 25 different nations
including both North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and
Asia with a concentration in both Nigeria and Iraq as shown on this table:

Let's look at the
entirety of terrorist attacks between 2000 and 2014. Like the recent
attack in Paris, 14 percent of all terrorist attacks in the period between 2000
and 2014 were coordinated efforts in which terrorists executed multiple attacks
simultaneously in a single city or nation. On average, attacks that were
a co-ordinated effort were slightly more deadly with 2.84 total fatalities
compared to 2.35 total fatalities in isolated attacks. Here is a table
showing the lethality of coordinated terrorist attacks among the nations with
the highest percentage of coordinated terrorist attacks between 2000 and
2014:

Among the nations that
had more than 40 attacks over the 15 year period, at 40 percent, France had the
highest proportion of attacks that were coordinated efforts. All of these
involved property damage and no fatalities with a substantial number of attacks being carried out by the Corsican National Liberation Front.

Let's close this posting
by looking at the perpetrator groups that are responsible for the most
coordinated terrorist attacks between 2000 and 2014:

Under its present
incarnation, ISIS is responsible for more than 750 attacks, a rather shocking
number given its late appearance on the world's stage. If we look further
back in history, the Islamic State's predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI),
carried out an additional 400 attacks.

As we can see, terrorists
who were trying to impact their audience with mass-casualty events during 2014
were extremely successful. With governments around the world granting themselves access to our most personal communications, it is interesting to note that the number of terrorist mass-casualty events is hardly under control. While such events may not have affected political change, they have certainly injected a large dose of fear into their targets.

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About Me

I have been an avid follower of the world's political and economic scene since the great gold rush of 1979 - 1980 when it seemed that the world's economic system was on the verge of collapse. I am most concerned about the mounting level of government debt and the lack of political will to solve the problem. Actions need to be taken sooner rather than later when demographic issues will make solutions far more difficult. As a geoscientist, I am also concerned about the world's energy future; as we reach peak cheap oil, we need to find viable long-term solutions to what will ultimately become a supply-demand imbalance.